Imperial Pink? The Wing Gears Up to Go Global

Audrey Gelman climbs the curling marble staircase of a stately Haussmann address in a vintage paisley sundress, the clap of her Gucci mules kicking up a thin layer of dust. It is the longest day of the year, and she and Lauren Kassan, cofounders of the women’s social-and-co-working club the Wing, have been touring Paris real estate since 9:00 a.m. They will visit eleven locations by the end of the day.

This one is a corner building on the Champs-Élysées with exquisite marble work in the stairwell and Rococo wall murals in the conference rooms. The first-floor tenant is Ladurée, the megalith macaronier whose pastel hues match the Wing’s decor. There was a time when a box of the meringue cookies was a coveted gift from France; now that Ladurée is everywhere from Baku to D.C.’s Union Station, they feel decidedly less special. I ask how the Wing, a phenomenon since the first club opened in Manhattan’s Flatiron district in October 2016, can avoid that fate as they gear up to go global.

“It’s a delicate balance,” concedes Kassan, a “Her Way or The Highway” T-shirt peeking out under her jean jacket.

View more

“I mean, we are ambitious,” says Gelman unapologetically. “The goal is to create spaces that women have never had before and to do it all over the world. From Detroit to Abu Dhabi.”

She slips her cat-eye sunglasses back on as we emerge into the throng of tourists on the boulevard. How many Wings will there be by the end of this year? Gelman tallies outposts on her fingers, her nails painted a bright-yellow gingham: Flatiron, SoHo, Dumbo, D.C., San Francisco, and Los Angeles. In 2019, they will more than double that number, with openings planned in Williamsburg (Brooklyn), Chicago, Seattle, Boston, Toronto, London, and here in Paris.

“The bones are beautiful,” says Kassan of the building we’ve just seen, “but I just think the location is too hectic.” And with that we are off to the next, a newly renovated site near the Parc Monceau, where the drop ceiling cannot be opened. “No?” Kassan asks the French broker. “Ashvack,” he replies mournfully. Kassan looks confused, then understands: “HVAC.”

It’s a bit of a Goldilocks exercise—one space has a trellised terrace but is deemed too sleepy a location; another is well situated but lacking in charm. “You have to kiss a lot of frogs,” says Gelman as we glide past the Arc de Triomphe. “You definitely get an ‘aha’ moment, and you know in two minutes.” That “aha” moment does arrive, in fact, in the form of a seventeenth-century limestone hôtel particulier in the heart of the Marais. The ground floor will be retail space, but the two stories above, with exposed wood beams and original ironwork railings overlooking an ivy-clad courtyard, will be 12,000 square feet of Wing world. The building was once the home of Louis XIV’s famed mistress Madame de Montespan, who, legend says, forbade all men except servants to enter the premises. Too good to be true? This keeps happening—the Flatiron Wing is located in the historic Ladies’ Mile, and the London location will be next door to what was once Britain’s first women’s club. “My dream is to one day open in a former strip club,” says Gelman.

“It feels like they can’t open them fast enough,” says ex–Planned Parenthood president and tote-carrying Wing member Cecile Richards. Indeed, the Wing’s wait list has always rivaled its membership (the current member tally of 5,000 will likely double by the end of the year). I was an early joiner and have to admit I felt soothed the minute I settled in. Was it the thermostat fixed to 74 degrees, significantly warmer than most public spaces set to suit men, or the relief of interacting only with other women? “It becomes subconscious because we adapt to it even as young girls,” says Gelman of the pressure of the male gaze. “To get to leave that at the door is such a freeing feeling.” Everything inside is designed to buoy one’s mood: The library (all books by or about women) is arranged into a rainbow by spine color, the plants are always green (they’re plastic), the Spotify playlists are peppy and familiar, and the language of the place is injected with moxie—stickers in the bathroom stalls remind members to “Flush It Like You Mean It,” a freekeh–and–poached egg dish is the “Fork the Patriarchy Bowl,” and a cucumber-kombucha mocktail is “Reclaiming My Thyme” (another is the “Virgin Woolf”).

Kassan and Gelman understood early that in our current gig economy, a co-working space is more than a desk and free coffee—it defines you in the way a choice of gym might have in the nineties. Gelman’s original idea, hatched while working for the political PR firm SKDKnickerbocker, was a practical-minded third space for women between “work & werk”—as the broadsheet posters tacked to the wall in the Flatiron location proclaim—but when she met Kassan, then at the fitness app ClassPass, a grander idea of a women’s community emerged. “Lauren’s take was, Yes, a shower’s great, but that wasn’t why women would join a place like this,” explains Gelman. And the Wing has become more and more far-reaching in its mission. Its networking events are packed, and its speaker series has featured everyone from Jennifer Lawrence to Hillary Clinton to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. All in all it has raised $42 million in funding—its latest round mostly from the co-working giant WeWork. Some have snarked that there is an irony in a feminist space that excludes men but is built largely on male venture-capital funds. Gelman is unfazed: “All money is touched by men one way or another.”

It is almost 9:00 p.m. in Paris, but the summer solstice means it feels like late afternoon. We sit down to dinner at the ancient bistro Chez L’Ami Louis. Gelman drinks Coca-Cola Light while Kassan sips Sancerre. Both are petite, with long, coffee-colored hair; they wear matching gold Jennifer Fisher W necklaces (“They’re like our Vice ring,” jokes Gelman). They share two entrées, lamb and poulet rôti, followed by a flourless chocolate torte. “I’d be bullshitting if I said I wasn’t exhausted,” Gelman admits when asked how they have handled the brand’s rapid growth. To decompress she searches cats on Instagram (she has three Persians) and shops on TheRealReal. Perusing StreetEasy relaxes Kassan. “I’m a psycho; I read everything,” says Gelman of her media diet.

“You sound like my grandmother,” teases Gelman, plucking up a runaway fraise des bois from the linen tablecloth and popping it in her mouth.

Pastel hues prevail at The Wing in Dumbo, Brooklyn, which opened in early 2018.

Photo: Tory Williams

While Gelman is the face and voice of the brand, it quickly becomes clear that the Wing would not exist without the thoughtful, detail-oriented Kassan, whose natural inclination is to remain behind the scenes, a perfect foil to her partner. Gelman emerged in her early 20s as that rare Venn-diagram overlap of a “real woman with a serious job”—she worked as press secretary to Scott Stringer and on Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign—who was also beautiful, stylish, and sample-size and so was pounced upon by every women’s magazine. Her love life (in 2016 she married Genius cofounder Ilan Zechory in a hipster fantasia in a former Ford factory in Detroit) and fraught friendship with Lena Dunham (she was the inspiration for the character Marnie on Girls) have been reported on and followed by a certain sector of New York cognoscenti with the same relish the rest of the country dedicates to the Real Housewives.

To some, Gelman’s many facets present a bewildering contradiction: Two weeks after watching the Golden Globes in a time’s up T-shirt with a group of fellow women’s-rights activists, she sat front row at Chanel couture, her many tattoos peeking out from her metallic mini. “You can exist as a person of substance in the world and enjoy those things,” she says. She’s right, of course, but she is also a victim of the tendency among some women to be harshest on their own sex. “Audrey’s a go-getter, and if you’re a go-getter you’re bound to ruffle some feathers,” says Wing founding member Tina Brown. “Plenty of men are go-getters, but people tend to express great consternation when that’s allied to an attractive young woman who’s got the same kind of business brio.”

Then there are the questions around the way the club markets its quippy brand of Instagrammable feminism: Wing merch currently includes a pale-pink “internet herstory” baseball cap and a “no-man-icure” and “sharpen your claws” emery-board set. “I think a lot of women have been skeptical of the Wing, like ‘What is this millennial-pink feminism actually going to do for us?’ ” says actress Hari Nef, also a founding member. “But if you look closely at who is showing up, it puts those anxieties to rest.” She means people like Valerie Jarrett and the feminist writer Jessica Valenti, who speaks to me from the Wing Dumbo. “I feel like feminism is the only social-justice movement where the aesthetic of it comes into question,” she says. “Can you imagine someone in the environmental movement being like ‘This is too green’?”

Rebecca Traister, author of the forthcoming Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger, is ambivalent about a company’s profiting from a social-justice movement but notes the political importance of the Wing’s kind of accessible feminism. (She is the proud owner of one of the club’s best-selling Andrea Dworkin pins.) “Are they laughing all the way to the bank? Sure,” she says. “Did Al Gore? Did Michael Moore? Whom do we hold to account for profiting from probably fundamentally good politics?”

“If we can accept that the Wing is what it is, which is one business among many, and one that happens to sell women something that they really want, then that’s great,” says feminist blogger and bellwether Sady Doyle, who says she would love to work out of the Wing but balked at the membership fees ($2,350–$2,700 a year). “It’s when we start placing the burden on what is essentially a profit-driven business to represent what feminism is in the twenty-first century that we start running into trouble.”

Indeed, the Wing’s price tag limits the club’s economic diversity. Most co-working spaces cost the same or more, but this one’s feminist mission can add new expectations of inclusivity. In May, the Wing introduced a scholarship program offering 100 free two-year memberships as well as professional mentoring. It has received over 10,000 applications so far.

“Historically women of color and the LGBTQ community have been left out of the feminist movement,” says Atima Lui, a member who was brought on as a diversity consultant, “and the Wing is intentional about making sure people like me—and people who don’t look like me—feel comfortable here.” Diversity has been a priority and is addressed in Wing programming and staff resources—there is a full-time diversity manager and community managers who track the demographics of each space. The beauty rooms are stocked with hair products for different hair textures, and the wallpaper depicting trios of naked nymphs in the SoHo “pump room” was customized to include women with different skin tones.

Men, however, are not welcome, and this has proved more controversial than perhaps anyone anticipated. In March, Jezebel reported that the New York Human Rights Commission was investigating the Wing for potential violation of the city’s Human Rights Law barring certain public businesses from gender-based discrimination. Almost immediately, everyone from Roxane Gay to Monica Lewinsky tweeted her fealty with the hashtag #IStandWithTheWing. Mayors of other cities came out with public statements of support, including Rahm Emanuel, who went so far as to send a letter inviting them to open in Chicago (winter 2019). When asked for an update, a spokesperson from the commission would say only that it “continues its investigation into the Wing.” According to Gelman, “they sent us a letter—on the first day of Women’s History Month—wanting to learn more about the business. It’s not like the Mueller investigation. They’ve backed off.”

Others have not. “I think in 2018 for a company to have a business model that is discriminatory, even if seems in a benign sort of way, feels very untimely,” says Katherine Franke, Sulzbacher Professor of Law, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Columbia University and author of a petition advocating for the commission’s enforcement of the Sex Discrimination Law (it was signed by a dozen lawyers and gender-studies and law professors). There’s also the evolving question of who qualifies as a woman. “We have just tried to lean into having the most broad definition possible,” Gelman says, noting that membership is not restricted only to people who are born female or identify as female but also includes those outside the gender binary.

Global expansion will present its own set of challenges. In Paris, Hélène Bidard, Mayor Anne Hidalgo’s deputy for women’s equality, feels “quite certain there will be a place for this kind of business,” noting that there have already been others of its kind popping up on a smaller scale. But Lauren Bastide, a feminist journalist and podcast producer, wonders if the French tradition of prioritizing universalist versus communitarian values may provoke pushback to a club that is self-segregating. For example, last summer Mayor Hidalgo blocked the Afro-feminist group MWASI from hosting workshops exclusively for black women. “Communautarisme in France is a very bad word,” explains Bastide. “It sounds like you want to destroy the republic to say you’re doing something with your community.”

“We’re not advocating for a world in which genders cease to interact with each other,” says Gelman, slouched but alert in the backseat of a taxi on the way to Charles de Gaulle. She’s removed the makeup from a Vogue photo shoot earlier in the day and has changed into an eyelet Ulla Johnson dress for the flight home. But she admits that “one day the Wing could look different.” Other female co-working spaces (of which there are a few—California’s Hera Hub, Toronto’s Shecosystem) accept men on a selective basis, and Gelman concedes such a thing “could be a reality in the future. I think our attitude has been to keep an open mind.”

As we sit at the gate waiting for our flight home, Kassan stares at her phone maternally. I ask if she’s looking at photos of her five-month-old, Quincy, but she is in fact checking Luma camera monitors at the Wing. Gelman eagerly logs in to hers as well. “I check at least once a day,” admits Kassan. They toggle between the different areas of the four locations, and coos of “Oh, SoHo’s not that crowded!” and “Dumbo’s so pretty” erupt from our corner of the waiting area. It is the end of a weeklong trip that included a three-day vacation with their husbands in Portofino on the way to the Cannes Lions festival, where Gelman was a speaker. It is the first time they have both been away from the Wing. “I miss it,” says Gelman wistfully, watching the screen as if it were a baby monitor.